


How a Sorcerer Lost an Eye and Gained Perspective

by astudyinpanda



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types
Genre: Animal Death, Bats, Gen, Magic, Minor Character Death, Origin Story, POV First Person, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27702698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: A gregarious sorcerer tells you the tale of how meeting an unfortunate band of adventurers on the road led to her losing her sight in one eye. It's not ahappystory, but she's hoping it'll end well.
Kudos: 1





	How a Sorcerer Lost an Eye and Gained Perspective

What happened to my eye? It does look like a cloud fell out of the sky and right into my face, doesn't it? Don't look too hard, now. The scar gets strange in its depths.

Sure, I'll tell you what happened to it, but it's a bit of a tale. Do you have time? Alright, here we go.

So before my adventuring days, me and Sunshine _—_ my donkey _—_ we'd walk from Oreville to Pineheight to Elder's Marsh, which is the first of them you've heard of I'm sure, to the capital. We'd spend a day in the capital running people's errands, and then we'd take the same path in reverse. Up and down the Great Northern Way we'd go every eightday.

Well, one day, after the homeward stop in Pineheight, me and Sunshine caught up with a group of adventurers and their pony. Less caught up with, than the adventurers ahead of us made a noise Sunshine didn't like, and she froze like a lump of stone in the center of the Way _—_ _like_ a stone, I said, it's a comparison I'm making _—_ until I promised her we'd go see what made the noise and it'd be nothing to fear. Oh yes, the travelers were adventurers like you. Three of them wore armor thick as my hand and carried weapons all over their persons, not to mention a man in wizard robes outside a wizard tower.

Now, my clients paid my rates for delivering their thisthats and buying their whatsits from the capital, but they gave me extra for good tales I picked up on the way. So once I'd shown Sunshine that these were regular traveling folk and their cute little pinto gelding, not monsters, we slowed down to walk along with the adventurers and see what news they had.

Turns out, the adventurers were headed to Oreville! I had seen one adventurer in Oreville before. All she'd wanted there was directions to the capital.

Of course I told the adventurers, "Oreville, why, I know exactly where that is! And isn't it a little tiny dot on the map, easy to miss and off the Great Way and all?" I got them to pay me to go back to Sunshine's and my stall in the stable, so long as they reached Oreville too. I don't just do magic, I negotiate!

Oreville was still two days off, and Sunshine got on well with their pony, so we talked along the way. The adventurers said a cave was their real destination, and Oreville was the nearest place to it on the common maps. On a clear day, you can stand on the logs that shore up the Oreville mine's ceiling and look to the mountains, and if you know what to look for you'll see that cave mouth, a spot of night in the trees on the mountainside. Trees won't grow in front of it, because trees have sense.

Bats loved that cave, but Oreville didn't. Everybody knew it was haunted. It's the most haunted place north of the capital until you get to that half-burned castle in the Wilds.

I'd never had a reason to visit a haunted cave before, but I told the adventurers, "Oh yes, I know where that is. For a bit extra I'll take you right into its shadow." They liked that idea just fine. See, negotiating!

So off we go down the Great Way, with me stopping every so often to make deliveries to the little nowheres between Pineheight and Oreville. The adventurers thought of some odds and ends they needed and I found those at good prices, almost all of them. You know how hard that is to do in the little places off a Great Way.

Only somehow, while I was making one of my deliveries, they lost their pony. I came back and they were looking high and yon for the beast. Well, a bugbear must've eaten it, because we never did find it. So then there they were with even fewer supplies, and nothing to carry them anyhow.

So I said, "Sunshine might be for rent," and we talked it over, and I'll tell you this because I know you'll appreciate it, I got them to agree on a gold ring a day for her. Gold. Ha. My negotiation skills in action.

They stayed in Oreville overnight and they came to the stable to get Sunshine and my directions to the cave in the morning, and that was all fine. Except after a while, I got to thinking. They'd lost their pony, hadn't they. What if they lost my Sunshine down a haunted cave? Then I couldn't make deliveries.

So I went after them. Quietly. I wouldn't want them to accuse me of trying to steal Sunshine back, which I'm sure less honest donkey renters have done.

By the time I got to the cave, they weren't outside anymore, and neither was Sunshine. They'd broken through all the spiderwebs near the back of the cave, and I spotted one of those poisonous spiders that bats don't eat, but in I went, hoping the adventurers had burned the rest of the spiders so none of them bit Sunshine. I mean, I didn't wish any harm to the spiders, or the adventurers either, but they weren't friends of mine.

So I went along past the spider, and the adventurers were talking so loudly I heard them all the way up by the daylight. They'd made the back of the cave roll into itself... I mean, the back wall was actually a big round stone, and they'd rolled that into a space that fit it, so it was a door, I suppose.

They'd got around a nasty spike trap somebody had set up on the other side of the rolling door. I didn't see any blood on it, so one of them must've seen it like I had and told the others how to pass it by. So I hopped past it too, and I walked for a while, and I heard them talking. The air tasted cold and rank.

Now, you've never seen darkness like the inside of that cave. Once I left the sunlight behind, it was just as if both my eyes had gone blind at once. If I hadn't seen the torchlight bounding off the walls ahead of me, I really might've worried, even with my darksight. But the adventurers had got Sunshine down this cave, and I wasn't going to let that old gal show me up for bravery, so down I went.

When I found the adventurers and Sunshine, they were all standing around a patch of rock wall. One of them was holding a torch up to it while the one in the wizard robes said things like "Hmm," and "Is that a conjunction of..." and "Now that could be a 'fa' or a 'fra' and that would change the meaning entirely."

So now I was curious, and I walked up to that wall too. It was covered in writing from the ceiling to the floor, but only in this narrow square area they were looking at. And the letters were thin, not the kind you see chiseled on signs in the capital. Small and thin and wavery, were these letters. They made my head feel twisted up just looking at them.

After a while the adventurers got bored with the muttering wizard and they all went on deeper into the cave. And this is the mistake from which I learned an important lesson, alright? I'm just telling you ahead of time.

In my darksight, the letters looked a bit like druid script. And I read that, because there's a druid near Elder's Marsh who goes through just boxes and boxes of ingredients from the capital and they're all imported by druids for druids, and I sure better read the labels before I buy the ingredients if I want to get paid back. So I thought I could figure out what that twisty writing said, if I read it slowly and sounded out each word, out loud.

The thin lettering rolled off the tongue like druid speak, if you or the person talking had gotten hit in the head. I made it all the way through the passage on the wall, to see if it made some sense once I'd heard the whole tale. The chiseler had been writing about some special thing. They kept capitalizing the name like it was the only one of its kind.

This something was stuck in this cave with some person that everybody knew, whenever this message was written anyhow. And the special thing would do something or other if someone said these specific words in that specific order, in the cave I was stood in. So, see, I figured a good bit of it out, even though it must've been older than the capital and the mountains themselves, for all I know.

If those ancients didn't want their special thing to come to life, then they oughtn't have put the words to bring it awake right on a wall where anybody who pushed open their funny door would read it. I'm sure they could've wrote it on a scroll. Or on little tablets like temples have. But nobody asked me.

No, those ancients put the words right next to their special thing. When I'd sounded out the last bit of writing, something rumbled. In a blink the cave air went colder than it should've gotten, without a wind. And then the adventurers started shouting, farther down.

They came running back up, dragging Sunshine by her lead because she'd freeze when she got scared, poor thing, like she did when she met them on the road. And behind them was... For a moment it was just like a starlit sky, but then it changed. It changed to a hard sound in your head, a spikey sound, and it shook the air around it, only a little, but fast.

It shook the cave like that. It shook and it shook, and we couldn't run through the sound, and then it shook so fast the wall exploded. Glass in the adventurers' packs exploded too. And the metal in their weapons, that went next.

There were sharp shards everywhere, hanging in the air, jittering and cutting into everything. Our bones were shaking. Everyone was screaming. Even Sunshine.

But it was a piece of that wall that got me in the eye. I was all cut up everywhere, but the piece was big as this finger here and it poked straight in and shook about. That felt as nasty as you might expect. The sound was still shaking us, too. I could see a bit out of the good eye, even though the adventurers had all dropped their torches.

And I told Sunshine and the adventurers to follow me, more than once I told them. I don't know if they heard me over the sound. One adventurer had already fallen on the cave floor with his arms around his head. The one in the robes was talking and waving his hands, but the fear on his face said his spell wasn't working like he wanted it to.

Poor Sunshine, she just wouldn't move. Maybe she was too cut up to walk, she was bleeding so much. But the shaking was getting worse. I couldn't stay and keep shouting at them.

I turned around and ran back toward the rolling door. At first I was afraid that the whole world was shaking apart, but the sound got quieter the farther up I went. There were other, horrible sounds.

Have you ever, after a hunt, carried a big carcass a long way on your shoulders? And then you get where you're going and you're tired of carrying it and you drop it and it makes that wet thunk sound on the ground... There were five of those, four regular ones and one big one.

I didn't look to see what'd happened. You can guess. Excuse me, where's my handkerchief? Ah, poor Sunshine.

The shaking followed me up and up, focusing itself, shuddering through the wall, making pieces fly off. But the sound kept getting thinner, like. By the time I got out the door, I couldn't hear it at all. When I looked back, the air was still twitching, and I knew if I went in again, I'd hear that sound.

I didn't go back. What could I have done? Well, true, I could've maybe done some magic, but I'd just watched that wizard fall all over himself magicking at it and the sound just kept going. And anyway, I still had a broken rock in my eye, and I didn't know that'd done anything but half blind me.

Yeah, that's right, it was the piece of the stone wall that gave me the magic. Or the sound that was in the stone, or the special old thing that made it. The first magic I figured out how to do was make armor around me, because I had to walk to the healer in Oreville, and I was still cut up all over. And when I found the magic to do it, it was like the whole universe shaking itself a little, like the wall had before it shattered.

Not that I could shatter a universe, mind, or that my magic's all having the run of me. Here, could an out-of-control sorcerer cool down your drink like... this? Handy, yeah?

Of course with no donkey and three weeks on my back in my empty cart waiting to heal, I came out of it with no gold either. Nobody in the capital wanted to buy the location of a deadly dangerous cave tomb. But they _did_ see some use in a person who could make magic armor for herself and find all the news in any town they went to.

So, three years on, here I am with even more magical tricks, a lesson learned about leaving old words on walls alone, all my traveling and negotiating experience, one good eye, and you. See why you need somebody like me along on your adventure? I'm in, right?

**Author's Note:**

> Holy hell, I spent way too much time on this. Thanks for existing, reading, and thereby helping to get this out of my head.


End file.
